Processes are often used to automate the flow of tasks associated with a service or a product. Recently, mobile devices such as phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and hand-held computers have begun supporting various easy to use browser-like navigational features. Users are increasingly able to type in or download more information on their devices With advances in computing and communication capabilities of hand-held devices, we are beginning to see a variety of applications in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), where some of the commerce functionality is moving from the e-commerce server side to the mobile client side.
Consider a scenario where a buyer is mobile, and wishes to process a buying request. The buyer can be either connected or disconnected at different times during this process, and he can access a local or remote listing of the products, fill out forms, make decisions and submit the buying request to the server. The freshness of data that the buyer sees is the freshness of the data cached locally, if the device is disconnected from the server If the decision regarding when to refresh the cache is left solely to the user (i.e., only the buyer can explicitly refresh local data), then communication is not fully taken advantage of.
In “Active views for electronic commerce”, by Serge Abiteboul et al., in Malcolm P. Atkinson et al., editors, VLDB'99, Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Sep. 7-10, 1999, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, pages 138-149, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999, a declarative view specification language is proposed to describe the data and activities of participants in an e-commerce application. Users perform a generated set of controlled activities and interact in a distributed manner. It is believed that greater flexibility than that afforded by the Abiteboul et al. language is necessary to support parametric queries in general e-commerce applications
In C. Mohan et al, “Exotica: A research perspective of workflow management systems,” Data Engineering Bulletin, 18(1):19-26, 1995, for example, the authors concentrate on collaboration issues, for which they propose a decentralized design that allows clients to be disconnected. The focus of the Mohan et al. article is on process execution rather than data access and retrieval
It would be desirable to overcome the limitations in previous approaches.